Charles Kumolu
Dr. Femi Aribisala, a pastor and
Vanguard columnist, in this interaction with Vanguard editors, ventilates his
passion for President Goodluck Jonathan and explains his position on the person
and politics of the president-elect, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari. Excerpts:
Femi Aribisala
What is your perspective on the just
concluded presidential election?
This has been the most important
political campaign I have witnessed in Nigeria. And the campaign will, to some
extent, define the presidency. There were things that needed to be said,
emphasized and brought to Buhari’s attention because we needed to remind him
that some things would not be acceptable if he becomes the president. Buhari
was made to go through a lot of phases. There were some things like the
Muslim-Muslim ticket which some of us made so much noise about and they just
had to drop it at some point. There were other things that Buhari did which he
would not normally do because we made so much noise about his antecedents.
Sometimes people simplistically define the process by the result. No! The whole
debate is to make him understand that it is not what he had before. It was to
make him realize that this is a democratic framework. It was also to sensitize
him that certain things would not be acceptable.
How did you come about your claim that INEC rigged the
election for Buhari?
There are certain things that are
interesting about this election. The first one is that it is one of the most
keenly contested elections that we have had in this country. It involved more
people. But 10 million less people voted than last time, which gives us some
idea as to how true some of the figures we have been having before had been.
But the question is: Where did the decline of 10 million come from? I
discovered that it came disproportionately in certain areas than it did in
others. And to some extent, if you look at the PVC distribution, you can
project the election. It is because Buhari could campaign in the South, but the
North did not permit same kind of liberty for the president. The president was
stoned in Buachi and he was threatened. By the time the pattern of PVC
distribution became very known even in war-torn states, it was easy to know
that it had been front-loaded. When you then analyze the election result
itself, you will discover that some places just had an incredible suppression
of voters in spite of high level of interest. Some people had an incredible
number of voters. And I am still interested in why more people voted in the
governorship election in Katsina than the presidential election.
On alleged gang- up against
President Jonathan
If Buhari had contested in the
United States, there is no way that he could win. It is impossible. We know his
antecedents. Nigeria doesn’t even teach history in schools. Once you bring up
the antecedents, the very idea of having such a person gunning for a position,
not even talk of the presidency, would have nullified his candidacy. I was not
just writing about Buhari because he tried to arrest me. There were all sorts
of things that he did and for which he never apologised. Buhari took ownership
of those things. And he never asked for forgiveness. At different points in the
history of Nigeria, he was given an opportunity to do that. We set up a Truth
and Reconciliation Commission but he refused to do it. You don’t forgive a man
who does not repent.
With regards to President Jonathan,
I had a problem with the gang-up. And I think it is wrong for two major tribes
to gang up against someone from the minority. Why should a President be called
clueless? I don’t think that someone will get away with calling Obasanjo
clueless. Somehow I feel that the South-South is entitled to have their son as
president and we were acting as if we were doing them a favour. If it was not
providence that threw up Goodluck Jonathan, I wonder if we would have
considered having a South-South president. In the interest of national unity,
the North-West producing the president again does not balance any equation in
Nigeria. If we are talking about a president from the North, we should be
talking about the North-East. I was offended that from the beginning, some
people insisted that there would be a civil war if the man ran. They also
insisted that they would create a problem if the man ran. And I said that
Nigeria belongs to every one of us. So that was an issue to me.
Wole Soyinka had vowed not to
support Buhari but a few weeks to the election, he asked Nigerians to forget
the past and move on. Are you not being unfair to Buhari given the
circumstances we found ourselves?
I said you only forgive somebody who
repents. Buhari has never asked anyone to forgive him. So you are jumping into
conclusion that we have a new Buhari? And the fact that he has won the election
has not won him forgiveness. We are going to see if Buhari has changed. And I
have said that if he has changed, he will do more than just wearing a suit. He
will come out and apologise for things done and overdone. He said he took
responsibility which is different from apologising. The man who admitted
stealing a cow is different from the one who said forgive me for stealing a cow.
Buhari is a very deliberate man.
I am not persuaded by the election
campaign that Buhari is going to be a very competent president. I have not seen
any competence in him. There was nothing in the campaign that was of substance
that impressed me. No new ideas came from Buhari or the APC. Most of the people
in APC are PDP people. So I am not persuaded that we are in for any new thing.
But I hope you are right.
Beyond Buhari, you are also not a
friend of Bola Tinubu. What are your reasons?
I wonder why anybody will be a fan
of Bola Tinubu especially if you live in Lagos. He is not a democrat. I don’t
like Bola Tinubu because he has monopolised Lagos politics. To some extent,
Ekiti governorship election was lost because of him. I live in Lekki and every
day I have to pay toll fare and I wish I was not doing that. APC is in control
of the media to a very large extent. Governor Fashola has gotten an easy pass
with the media. It is easy for a Lagos State governor to be seen to be good
because he has resources. In the light of the resources of the state, only 10
percent of the people have access to potable water, the same percentage has
access to educational structures. In order for the APC to survive, the
resources of this state had to be commandeered for political purposes. So, you
can see the end justifies the means.
I think it will be foolish of Tinubu
to take AIT to court over the Lion of Bourdillion case because if he does, the
kind of things that would be revealed about him would be shocking. This
godfather business is undemocratic. Let people choose their leaders. One person
cannot sit somewhere and decide what is best for everybody. I don’t believe
that elections are free and fair in Lagos. I do not believe that Jimi Agbaje
lost this election. It was APC’s manipulation that brought out the governorship
election result. That is my own opinion.
Not many Nigerians are asking Buhari to apologise. What
exactly do you want him to apologise for?
It is part of my problem with the
media at the moment. We are being given the impression that Buhari won by a
landslide. Please let us look at what INEC declared. 12.8 million people voted
for Goodluck Jonathan. So don’t assume that they don’t have their reasons or
that the people that want him to apologise don’t exist. I maintain that it is
very easy to say that we don’t want to look at the past because we want to look
at the future. But we need to understand the past in order to move to the
future.
So, Buhari needed to apologise. He
needed to ask for forgiveness because he killed people through extra-judicial
means, he jailed people for telling the truth, he kept people in jail even when
kangaroo courts that he set up said they were not guilty. He manipulated the
judiciary into jailing some people. I could go on and on. That is why I said
that if we were a serious democracy, he would never have gotten away with it.
There is a reason Buhari was not nominated by the northerners. They voted for
Kwankwaso and Atiku at the primaries. Buhari got his candidacy through Tinubu.
We don’t have to pretend that Buhari is well liked because he has won, it seems
to be like that but we should know that he only has the plurality of 2.5
million votes.
In your penultimate column you claimed the emphasis on
the alleged rigging was in the South-South
and South-East, but the PDP was beaten in
areas where they had strengths like Niger,
Kaduna and other places. You think the resentment
was not real?
I mentioned those areas as well. I
mentioned Kano, Jigawa, Katsina and Bauchi. I said the results from these
places were inflated. We have video recordings of underage voting. There is a
problem with the election because if we accept what the PVCs are saying that
17.1 million registered for the election in the North-West alone, the zone will
determine future elections. If they decide that they want somebody to be
president, by the time we will be looking at the result and they will come up
with 9.1 million from Kano, the whole equation would change.
What can you get from Imo and
Anambra? So, if the North-West vote is more than the South-South and
South-East, there is going to be a problem. There will be a problem if we don’t
get the proper census of Nigeria. They used to tell us that Kano was bigger
than Lagos. Jigawa was split from Kano and Kano is still supposedly bigger than
Lagos. In this last election, about 3.1 million people voted in Kano and
Jigawa. And 1.4 million people voted in Lagos. That is twice the number of the
people in Lagos. I don’t believe these figures. If you do, fine. I am entitled
to my opinion.
You said you don’t like Tinubu because of the reasons you
adduced, but when the books would be written, it would be said that Tinubu
contributed significantly to Buhari’s emergence as a democratically elected
president. What do you make of that?
I don’t agree that Tinubu made
Buhari the president. Let’s get the facts right. Tinubu made Buhari the
presidential candidate of the APC. But in the presidential election, Buhari did
not win Tinubu’s votes. And that is part of the problem. All the discussion
before was that everything would be determined in the South-West, but Tinubu
did not deliver the South-West. The margin of defeat in the presidential
election was not much in Lagos. Tinubu, to some extent at the presidential
level, is expendable. And that is the problem. You can actually not choose a
president just from the North. It interests me that while the campaign was
going on, all the northerners making noise that it was their turn disappeared.
They did not campaign with Buhari.
The people campaigning were Tinubu, Amaechi, Fashola. I bet you that the
northerners are going to come out come May 29. And you will see it happen.
Don’t think that the people that had been clamouring for power to return to the
North in the past six years, were doing that for Tinubu to inherit. I don’t
believe that. They have an agenda. That is why I said the story is not told
because the election has taken place, the story will unfold when the
administration comes on board.
Are you saying that you are impressed with Jonathan’s
performance?
Yes I am. I think APC ran a
fantastic campaign. They hired Obama’s people and they controlled so many
different things. So, a lot of things were simply propaganda. And part of the
problem with the PDP was that they had it so easy for so long that they did not
know how to campaign anymore. So, they thought that it was just going to be
another cake work, and this was a different issue for them. Many of the things
that Jonathan did, his people like Reuben Abati did not talk about it. People
just did not know anything until some spirited efforts were made at the
last-minute during the extension. That was when they now told people what had
happened. But within the framework of Nigerian presidency, Jonathan is a good president
if you compare him with others who had occupied that position.
You are talking about the North being the decider with the
way things are now. What then do you think the South-East and South-South can
do?
Within the framework of the
democratic experiment in Nigeria, the North has been the part of Nigeria that
has held the country together. The South-East is neither here nor there. The
civil war is still an issue. The South-West doesn’t often show an inclination
to take a national outlook. The North voted for Abiola. But the problem with
this particular election is that we have an APC that is very sectarian in
outlook. APC is not a national party like the PDP. APC is an aggregation of
sectarian parties that came together simply to get power at the centre. And in
order to do that, they had to distort the process. That is why I said that
northerners were intimidated and told that they must vote for Buhari. And this
is bad for democracy. When politics gets to the sectarian level, it becomes a
problem. And we have allowed it to define and determine this election.
There was no level-playing ground.
Buhari could go anywhere in the South and nobody threatened him, but anytime
Jonathan wanted to campaign in the North, bombs will explode. We can’t say we
are not aware of it. And this tendency will not help this democracy. But we
must talk about it. Even though we will say that we are glad that we have
missed the bullets of rioters, we need to talk about it.
The truth is that if Jonathan had
won, there would have been conflagration because you have a party that only
accepts victory. And there is nothing democratic about that. Buhari lost three
times, he never congratulated the winners. Jonathan lost once and conceded
defeat. Thank God for that. But if Buhari had won, we would have been in
trouble. And democracy is not like that. It should not be like that. That is
why people who say I am an intractable opponent of Buhari are mistaking my
passion. Why can I hate them? In the final analysis, Buhari is now the president-elect,
he is going to be my president because the people have spoken. We must ensure
that the culture of our democracy is such that a party can field a candidate in
the North and not be intimidated with all kinds of sentiments that are going to
be introduced. So, this was, in many respects, a flawed election.
Looking forward, do you think this man has the capacity to do
the job because many people voted for him because he is seen to be
incorruptible? In your view, do you think this man will deliver on the
expectations?
In my view, I am pessimistic. I
don’t think Buhari can move the economy forward because he has no understanding
of economics. I tell people that I am waiting for our currency to be equal to
the dollar which is one of the things he promised.
One has to see who his advisers are.
Again, one has to deal with his antecedents. If there was a change in Buhari,
we should have known it in the last three months. It should have come out from
his pronouncements during the campaign, but there was nothing there. He said he
is going to give N5,000 to 20 million poor people in Nigeria and that is N120
billion which he is going to give away in a situation where the country is cash
strapped. I am going to see how this is going to happen. Buhari does not understand
how to tame corruption. He did not succeed the last time.
There are certain tendencies in the
man that tells me he does not understand how to tame corruption because we are
talking of a change campaign. But who are the people around him? They are not changed
people. It is paradoxical that now, the party chairman is saying they don’t
want defectors anymore. But how did they come to where they are? I don’t see
these changes coming with Buhari. This was a rhetoric that was convenient for
the purpose of winning an election. It has succeeded, but don’t let us ascribe
more to it. It is going to have some grand gestures but, in the final analysis,
will be meaningless.
Don’t you think Nigeria needs a
strong leader that can look at influential people in the society and insist
that the right things be done? It was so bad that even after the Immigration
recruitment tragedy that the Minister of Interior, instead of being sanctioned,
was given a national award?
That is not the problem now. Buhari
is not the type of person that I would like to call my president. I don’t even
agree that he is a strong leader. He is not very intelligent, he is not very
articulate and I don’t even agree that he is a strong leader. Most of the
positions he held, his deputies were in charge. People run circles around him.
Part of the problem with democracy is that we don’t necessarily have the best
choices. You have to choose between bad choices or some bad choices. I don’t
see anything that will, ordinarily, make me to want Buhari as my president. I
don’t see how he is an improvement on Jonathan for whatever it is that you
think of Jonathan.
Are you not expressing preconceived biased. People are
saying Jonathan saved the country from crisis but that he did not do us proud
as president, a situation that Chad and Niger now assist us to combat internal
security challenges. Are you saying that you have not recognised personal
failings on the side of Jonathan and that you don’t see anything good in
Buhari?
Buhari left the army 30 years ago; a
lot has changed in 30 years. Maitasine were bow and arrow people. But Boko
Haram is a completely different kettle of fish. And his approach to the
campaign does not seem to recognise that. Part of the problem is that we could
not run after Boko Haram so that the borders of Chad, Cameroon and Niger are
not violated. And they only became receptive to that when Boko Haram became a
problem to them. And that was recently. If we could have surrounded them, it
would have been easier for us.
Why didn’t we?
We couldn’t because they could run
into Cameroon. The issue about Nigeria is that we are such a big country
relating to our neighbours. We have traditionally bent over backwards to tell
our neighbours that we have no territorial ambitions and intentions, which could
account for the fact that we gave away Bakassi to Cameroon. No country gives
away its territory to another country. The tendency in Nigeria is not one that
we will begin to violate the territorial integrity of our neigbours. And
Goodluck Jonathan is not that kind of person. A situation where, in the middle
of an election, Britain and America will begin to interfere does not mean well.
Isn’t that part of the president’s
failure?
It is not. It shows you that they
have been biased against this country. The Americans refused to sell arms to
the government and the government had to go looking in other places. Boko Haram
is a different thing. It took the Americans 10 years to get Osama Bin Laden.
But America violated another country’s territory to get him?
That is different. The government
invited them and they got a United Nations resolution to back it up. It is so
bad that when you read the papers today, you don’t hear about the Jonathan
people. They have all disappeared. I am insisting on Jonathan because he is
important. The voices of his people have not disappeared. We are going to come
back and hold this government to task.
They have made all sorts of noise
about Boko Haram, I want to see how Buhari, a retired general, would handle the
situation. I want to see him destroy Boko Haram. I want to see how long it
would take him. I want to see how long he is going to get the Chibok girls
back. Ezekwesili has been making noise about that and I tweeted her to suggest
how to get these girls back. We would see how Buhari will do the magic.
Does it mean that you don’t see
anything wrong in Jonathan? The Americans say nice guys don’t win ball games.
The president may be a nice chap, but his niceness diminished Nigeria’s
standing and reputation. Don’t you think he was too nice for the job?
Jonathan has lots of faults.
Jonathan had a peculiar problem. He knew that he could not win an election in
Nigeria without the North because he is from a minority area. So he bent over
backwards with many things.
That is why some of us were
interested in his second term because then he would not need any of these
people. Some people in the South-South said he did not even do anything in the
South. Most of the things he did were in the North yet all he got were four
million votes. There were a number of things he did for political expediency.
If he fought insurgency in a particular way, people like Buhari would have
risen against him. And if he did not fight insurgency, they would have said
that he is incompetent. He had to play both sides and clearly the approach that
he took did not work. It failed him but that should not prevent us from
recognising the dilemma that he was in. He was a president that had his eyes on
second term and he felt that he needed to placate some people but it did not
work.
Do
you think that it was politically savvy of him?
It was his prerogative to have
decided not to even run. But he thought he was going to get the votes. In 2011,
he got eight million votes from the North and Buhari got 12 million. In 2015,
he got four million votes from the North. It was not unrealistic for him to
still think that he could still get votes from the North. In 2011, Jonathan got
37 percent of the votes in Katsina. Given the fact that PDP had foothold in the
North, it was not unrealistic for him to expect that he could still use the
party structure and the governors to get an appreciable amount of votes from
the North. But in a place like Bauchi, which is under PDP, practically no vote
came from there. Jigawa is under PDP but it was like PDP was non-existent in
those states.
However, our democracy is in trouble
because the numbers have already been manipulated according to the pattern of PVC
distribution. It was not manipulated for not just this election, but the next
one. Therefore, we will have a situation where same people will decide again
that the North will produce the president as long as we are dealing with these
so-called PVCs. They have permanently ensured that one region has supremacy
over others. Let us not pretend that it is not what has been achieved. So we
need to address that now. We need to start talking about it now.
What is the problem with the PVC?
The problem with the PVC is that
nine million people are registering to vote in war-torn Borno. Where are they
getting these people? How are they getting 17.1 million people in the
North-West? And 15 million in the South-South and the South-East. We have to
determine who gets the PVCs. At the point of registering for the PVC, we need
to know the nationality of those registering. We need to know if they are
Chadians, Nigerians, children or adults. It is quite significant for me that
these PVCs failed in the election in some places.
Why should the PVC fail in the
South? Buhari did not have any problem of voting but the PVC did not recognise
the number one citizen of the country. The failure rate of the PVC in the
South-South and South-East was high. In the middle of the election, the rules
of the game were changed and the PVC was not needed anymore. By the time we got
to the governorship election, the PVC worked better. And I ask: Why did it work
better? I believe that the PVC was programmed to fail.
Is
this not just prejudice?
I wrote an article in Vanguard
before the election where I said I don’t believe.
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